Shipwreck
by stefanie bean
Summary: The good ship Elizabeth wasn't all that Libby Smith gave Desmond Hume on a summer's evening in Newport Beach.


**Shipwreck**

Even before Desmond Hume entered that too-clean and shiny Newport Beach coffee shop, he knew he couldn't have afforded the shabbiest hotel in the area. Not that it mattered, as it was too late in the day to exchange his pounds sterling for dollars. The early evening breezes blew warm and balmy across the marina, though, fresh with only a faint fishy stink. If worst came to worst, he could always roll up his jacket for a pillow and join the ranks of the homeless who dotted the boardwalks and small parks around the marina.

Then, as if by magic, she appeared behind him in line, bright and chipper like so many Yank women, yet with a fragility around the eyes and mouth that he liked. She bought him coffee, typical American sludge with a chalky bitterness which couldn't be disguised, no matter how much sugar and _ersatz_ cream you ladled into it. He wasn't going to complain, though. Desmond was never one to look a gift horse in the mouth, and as the coffee took hold and he grew more alert, she began to look more interesting by the minute.

The first part of their conversation went by like a blur, and before Desmond knew it, he was the putative possessor of a sailing yacht. It had happened so fast that it seemed unreal, and now he didn't know what to do next. He didn't want to ask where the boat was docked, and she didn't volunteer. He had a maxed-out credit card, no local currency, no phone, no place to sleep, and if he just got up and pretended to have somewhere else to go, he might never see her or this opportunity again.

So Desmond, normally so self-possessed, sat fiddling with his paper coffee cup, pouring sugar into refill after refill, thrown off-balance by this mysterious woman. Usually at this point he would laugh, crack jokes, wonder silently to himself if her hair was really red or just a good dye job, and how long it would take him to find out for sure. He was the one who normally led women on, not the other way around. It was only when Elizabeth rummaged in her purse for her car keys that he realized how desperate he was.

Even so, he hesitated when she invited him to have supper with her. The invitation wasn't exactly a surprise. She'd already given him more than one of those long looks which he knew so well through his wandering life, before hitching his wagon to Penny Widmore's star.

You couldn't say Elizabeth was buying him or anything, either. She'd offered to give him the boat even before she made her move. Maybe there was a boat, maybe there wasn't. Maybe it would make its way into his hands, or not. The old sensation ran up his spine, the flare of excitement at the onset of an adventure.

When Desmond nodded, smiling broadly, Elizabeth remarked, "You know, restaurants around Newport Beach are always so crowded, and rush hour goes on till seven or eight."

"Umm, hmm," Desmond said, letting her lead. That wasn't his normal style, but he could be flexible. If Elizabeth decided to sit this one out, nobody would get their feelings hurt. And there were always more in port, weren't there?

"My condo's only a few minutes' drive away."

When Desmond didn't answer, only gave another broad, welcoming smile, she did exactly as he expected, and started to prattle. Would he like to go there? There might even be something in the fridge. If not, there was a new restaurant down on Balboa which the tourists hadn't found out about yet. That meant a lot of traffic, though. Then again, there was always carry-out.

Then she gave Desmond that certain downward glance which so far he had never misinterpreted, and said, "We could order in."

Something in him still wasn't sure, though. Her smile was bright but her laugh was brittle, and her eyes darted about like agitated mice trying to escape their cage. It was almost dark, though, and the thought of sleeping on the beach with the rummies didn't appeal to him at all. So he gave her the warmest of grins and said that while carry-out was grand, ordering in suited him just fine.

She drove the silver BMW convertible through tangled traffic with casual precision. They pulled up to a peach-toned building with a Spanish tile roof, and Desmond gave a low whistle of appreciation. This was the kind of place where rich Americans lived, the ones that you saw in movies, that you only dreamed of.

Inside, he had never seen anyplace so white, from the carpets and the overstuffed couches down to the paintings on the walls. He and Elizabeth were the only things with color in that huge flat. Even the martinis were garnished with onions pale as eyeballs, rather than gray-green olives. "This makes it a Gibson," she said as she handed Desmond his icy cocktail, and after two or three of them, Desmond wasn't thinking about how white the flat was, or Elizabeth's scurrying eyes, or even of Penny any longer.

When the food came, in a moment of paranoia he thought that the deliveryman wore too familiar a smile, and Elizabeth's tone was a shade too warm and welcoming as she handed him two twenties for a tip. He thought, _She's done this before, __and not that long ago, either. _

Then he pushed it out of his mind as they drank, ate spicy Mongolian barbecue, and drank some more. She mostly just pushed the rib tips around on her plate, and halfway through the meal excused herself to go to the lav. That gave Desmond time to make another shaker of Gibsons, and finish off two more besides. When she came back she looked so pale and drawn that it gave Desmond pause, even through the alcoholic fog. But then she said that eating wasn't really what was on her mind, anyway.

She wasn't much in bed, he thought as he pumped away, as Elizabeth lay still and unresponsive beneath him. He knew he could inspire women to wild cries, arms clinging to his back, their legs wrapped tight around his hips. With Penny, for instance-

But best not to think about that right now.

At least he wasn't sleeping under an overpass, or worse yet, on a concrete bunk in some LA gaol. Instead, he was in America, drinking Hendricks gin in a sumptuous flat, with a quite passable woman in bed with him. No matter that she was approaching a certain age and was definitely not a natural redhead. Even if the boat never materialized, he was having a pretty fine time.

Only once did he wonder exactly what he was doing there. Waking up right before dawn, he eased his pounding hangover with the warm martinis left over in the shaker. He swept the styrofoam dishes with their congealed sauce and rib bones into the trash, not out of tidiness, but because he was afraid if he looked at them any longer, he was going to be sick on Elizabeth's pristine white rug.

He headed for the loo, thinking to borrow a bit of her toothpaste to scrub the bird-cage liner out of his mouth, and came upon her by surprise.

At first she didn't hear him pad into the gleaming granite and tile room, where she stood at the mirror staring at her own image. Then she saw him, and the unrestrained disgust on her face shocked him into a vestige of sobriety. He backed off and went back to bed, as guilt and anxiety systematically shredded the cloak of alcohol in which he'd wrapped himself.

He pretended to be asleep when she slid under the covers, her body miles apart from his on the far side of the king-sized bed. She never touched him again. As hot, white sunlight filled the windows and made it impossible to ignore the start of the day, she announced in a cold voice that they were going to the bank to pick up the _Elizabeth's_ title, at which point she would sign it over to him, then drop him off at the marina. After that, the _Elizabeth_ was his to do with as he pleased. No doubt the bank would would also exchange his currency.

"I don't expect breakfast," she said in a voice tight with restrained hysteria.

Desmond shrugged; he couldn't have eaten anything anyway. In the bank's glassed-in lounge for "select customers," away from the lines and the _hoi polloi_, a beautifully-dressed woman in her forties with a face immobile as glass witnessed the title transfer. Desmond and Elizabeth sat tight-lipped on far ends of a stiff Danish-modern couch, not even looking at one other.

Their silence even unnerved the bank representative, who finally said, "I've been there before with the property settlements, believe me. The dividing up the assets part is the worst, isn't it?"

Elizabeth just stared at the woman as if she'd started babbling in a foreign language, then gave Desmond such a look of loathing that he thought he would melt into the coarse orange upholstery.

Outside on the sidewalk, with the title resting securely in his jacket breast pocket and a thousand pounds sterling tucked into his money belt, Desmond said in a fit of sarcastic pique, "I don't think you got your money's worth, lady." Elizabeth Smith said nothing, just climbed into her silver Beamer, and with a wave and a rigid, wide-eyed smile, drove off.

Later, after the _Elizabeth_ had shipwrecked on the rocky Island coast, then during his imprisonment in the Swan Station, Desmond had a lot of time to think things over. It had been far too easy. She must have worked for Widmore. What else could it have been? Penny's father knew that Desmond had no resources of his own to spend on that wild goose chase of a round-the-world yacht expedition. Elizabeth Smith had probably followed him from the LAX arrival gate, then made up that sob story about a husband. Dead just a month? What had she taken him for, an idiot? There probably had been no husband at all.

If she thought him an idiot, she was right. Because Elizabeth Smith was no doubt jaunting around the world, enjoying her life of leisure, while he rotted underground. Best to forget her, and the supposedly chance encounter which brought him to this bloody damned Island. And so he did.

Then, three years later, after Desmond had stained his hands with his fellow button-pusher Kelvin's blood and later sat alone for forty days in a living tomb, he came to a fateful hour when he held a gun in one hand and a near-empty bottle of J. Darby's in the other, thinking that he'd hashed things up pretty badly, and that Penny was going to be way better off without him.

As he stared into the barrel, took a swig, then stared again, he thought of Elizabeth Smith after all those years. No conspirator she, he realized with rare insight. Only a sad, broken woman who, like him, had been sailing blind through an ink-black night with no lighthouse in view, and had probably careened into the same rocks. Who, like him, had probably spent far too much time staring into a future blank as a concrete wall, one which no amount of cheerful psychedelic paint could rehabilitate. Writing one note after another, then tearing it up. Giving expensive things away. Making plans. Tying up loose ends. All the warning signs, in other words.

Sometimes you had to be the one staring down into that shiny carbon-steel tunnel to infinity before you recognized when somebody else was, too.

And in that final fateful hour before John Locke's loud banging on the Swan Station hatch door broke Desmond's gloomy concentration and saved his life, he knew that the look of contempt which Elizabeth Smith had shot him across the bow was directed not at him, but at herself.

(_the end_)


End file.
